We love our science fiction, but we titter when we talk about UFOs. People go into modes of rebuttal rather than accepting information as reportage. Have you been watching Larry King of late? He's done two programs about UFOs in the last two weeks, where government and military officials gave testimonials to their astonishing experiences, but, de rigueur, a member of the Skeptic's Society has been there to shoot them down.
The reality of another intelligence would be the biggest news since Galileo. When we found out Earth wasn't the center of the solar system, let alone not the center of the universe, we were freed from a worldview in which our planet dominated. Our social order then couldn't hold, and, in a less than lordly light, kings gave way to democracies and we got the science that defines our modern world.
Our government, on the premise that people would panic if they knew something beyond our control was engaging us, put a lid on investigating what could be other intelligences. See the REPORT OF SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY PANEL on UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS CONVENED BY OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE, CIA January 14 – 18, 1953, for long-classified info on a meeting that set government policy, which was to ridicule rather than investigate UFOs. However, after many years of delivering non-threatening beauty, we could rest easy in the awareness that if the circles come from elsewhere there isn't going to be an invasion.
Human begins have it in our psyches that we hate being conned — a fear that flourishes in the right and wrong world. But a higher order, that can subsume that one, is the realm of mystery. This cosmos is so awesome, where we continually pierce more of its veils, that some openness to what we don't know is good for us. It keeps us dreaming, a state in which new and better realities could be ushered in. Here's what my favorite cosmologist, physicist Brian Swimme, has to say about that, in reflections he made after seeing my almost finished documentary, WALKING IN CIRCLES:
Albert Einstein once remarked that for the human there is no more powerful feeling than that of the “mysterious.” In fact, he was convinced this feeling for the mysterious was the cradle for all works of science, art, and religion. In light of Einstein's conviction, one might ask: “What is the opposite of a feeling for the mysterious?” The opposite would be the sense that one understands it all. The opposite would be the feeling that one is in possession of a system that explains all the phenomena in the universe. For such a person, the universe loses its appeal for it becomes something we don't really need to pay attention to. The universe becomes an exemplification of a theory that one has already understood. No real surprises are possible, only the working out of a logical system through time. When a feeling for the mysterious is lost, one become s vulnerable to the various fundamentalisms plaguing our planet, each one with its passionate certainty that it has all the answers while every other system is just superstition.In moments of stress and breakdown, there is a powerful drive in us to acquire answers and explanations. Certainly in our own time when we are dismantling ecosystems around the planet and deconstructing the stable climate upon which our civilization is based, we feel a deep need to know what is real and what is good and how to proceed. This need can become so great we are liable to latch onto one of these simplistic pseudo-explanations just to quell the feelings of fear and doom surfacing in us. “Walking in Circles” does not provide any such simplistic explanations. This restraint is one of its greatest achievements. By insisting that the Crop Circles are beyond any easy explanation, “Walking in Circles” enables us to make peace with living in the ambiguity of not knowing. This ability to live with ambiguity is related to a sense for the mysterious and together these two may be the most important factors for deep creativity to take place. At the very least, we need to realize that an embrace of ambiguity is a form of humility when confronted by the magnificent complexity of nature.
One of the great benefits of viewing WALKING IN CIRCLES is the feeling one can get of wading into the mysterious. Through its balanced and wide-open approach to the phenomena of crop circles, the film has the power to ease us out of some of the prior certainties we might have had. WALKING IN CIRCLES explores and celebrates the fact of the existence of these designs. And as we are guided into this reflection, we find ourselves considering new ideas about the nature of our universe. We begin to imagine that things might be different than we thought. We might even begin to release ourselves from some of the tired explanations lodged into our minds by the media. But most important of all, as we view the film we might even begin to feel stunned by the simple fact that here we are in the midst of this overwhelming mystery, the universe.